Westbrook: Pioneer medicine in 1800s was a work in progress

When pioneer ranchers and hard-riding cowboys came to the South Plains, they brought with them a pressing need for medical expertise.

And whether it was snakebites or bullet wounds that needed fixing, doctors were in demand.

The truth is, there were maladies that made snakebite look easy. They included appendicitis, tuberculosis and the often fatal one-two punch of flu followed by pneumonia in a time before antibiotics.

Wives of the ranchers and farmers faced all of that plus shadow-of-death childbirths in remote areas where a doctor could be summoned only as quickly as 12 to 18 hours.

That may be why Joseph Barton is said to have plowed an eight-mile furrow to the home of Dr. E.M. Harp because he knew his wife’s delivery would occur in February — and it might happen at night or in a snowstorm when he would need some means of navigation.

Dr. Harp, who lived five miles north of Abernathy on a ranch of his own, was accustomed to placing a lantern in his windmill tower so it could be seen by those looking for medical help at night, according to O.C. “Hoppy” Toler, Abernathy-based historian.

Toler said his wife, Mona, and her father once interviewed a pioneer who had been eight years old when his family moved to Hale County in 1892. He confirmed that more than one rancher had resorted to the plowed furrow method of finding a physician in the dark. And Betty Major, whose father was the son born to the Bartons in February 1897, told the Avalanche-Journal in 2009 that she had personally heard the account.

Henry Jenkins, a Cochran County cowboy who was stricken with pneumonia in March 1892, illustrated the vulnerability of those living on the frontier. He was taken by wagon across a distance of more than 50 miles to the Nicolett Hotel in Lubbock. Then, Dr. J.W. Carter of Crosby County was summoned from a distance of about 30 miles.

Jenkins became the first person to be buried in what is now the expansive City of Lubbock Cemetery.

Dr. Robert Carr, who in retirement has become a researcher of history and a speaker on the topic, has found that life expectancy in the general population of the nation was only slightly more than 40 years in the time around 1900. “The state of medicine in the 1900s was influenced strongly by the sparseness of the population and the vast geography of the country.”

Some of the medical history of this region will soon become the focus of a centennial observance by the Lubbock-Crosby-Garza County Medical Society.

The organization plans to begin an evening program with a reception at 6 p.m. April 2 at the Overton Hotel.

Appropriately, the name of the hotel bears the name of the physician who is considered one of the pillars of Lubbock’s medical history.

Dr. M.C. Overton came to Lubbock in 1901, carrying a parasol, according to his daughter, Nan Overton West.

She told the Avalanche-Journal in 2010 that he had come from Kentucky, and was wearing a tall silk hat and a frock-tailed coat.

He adapted.

According to Dr. Carlos Rizo-Patron, who is researching information and preparing an audio-visual presentation for the Lubbock-Crosby-Garza County Medical Society centennial, the first Anglo birth in this area was even further back.

“The first recorded birth was delivered by a Dr. William Hunt from Estacado in the year 1879,” he said.

The daughter was born to the Paris Cox family.

Lawrence L. Graves’ book, “A History of Lubbock,” notes that the town was fortunate in escaping major epidemics during its earliest year, though there was typhoid fever in the summer of 1909, and outbreaks of measles, smallpox and scarlet fever.

Pneumonia accounted for 36 deaths during the 1912-1919 period, and tuberculosis took 24.

The struggle to live in a frontier town was evident also:

“Surprisingly, diseases caused by defective diet outranked typhoid and influenza. Pellagra was listed as the cause of death in 12 cases, and malnutrition accounted for six more,” Graves’ book stated.

Jo Evelyn Stanton, who was a nurse before retirement, was given an eye-witness account of the flu epidemic of 1918 by her grandmother, Sallie Karr.

Pneumonia, which often followed the flu, apparently was the deadly complicating factor.

“If you took pneumonia, you just usually died,” Stanton said.

Her grandmother lived in north Lubbock County, near what is now north Frankford Avenue. She had become aware that she hadn’t recently seen a Groves family who lived half a mile away, and was concerned about them.

“She went down to see about them during the flu epidemic,” Stanton said. “Snow was on the ground real bad.”

When Karr arrived, there was an ominous air about the property, almost an atmosphere of disaster.

“When she got there, she said there were lots of cattle just bawling and bawling. So, the first thing she did, she went to the cattle pen and found a grubbing hoe, and broke the ice on the pond. There was real heavy ice on top of it, and she broke a lot of it around the edges so they could drink. She turned on the windmill, because it had been turned off, and thought she could get fresh water running into the pond.

“Then she went into the house and found all of them sick — every one of them.”

Karr went to the family’s smokehouse and brought back a large portion of meat, put it into a big pan of water to boil, then went to the root cellar to get all of the vegetables she could find to go into the soup.

“She fed them — they were all too sick to come to the table. And then she went upstairs and fed the two kids, and she said they were just burning up with fever. She tried to cool them down with cold water, and said they were all bundled up and covered up ... you know, when you have fever, you’re not supposed to cover up, you’re supposed to try to cool yourself off. By being a nurse, I know how that works — we have even put patients on cooling pads in the hospital, and they would think they were freezing, but it cooled their body temperature down.”

Karr placed the remainder of the soup in a cold place to keep for the next day, and went home.

“Then the next afternoon, after she took care of all of our bunch — they were all sick except her — she said, ‘About 4 o’clock, I better go down to the Groves and see how they are doing.’ ”

She noticed that the cattle had access to food and water, so she went directly to the house, reheated the soup and fed the family downstairs again.

“She went upstairs to take some of the broth to feed those kids, and when she got up there, they were dead.”

Two men were coming down the road in a wagon, so she asked them for help.

“They had been to Lubbock to get some supplies, and they came and helped her. She said she washed the children and dressed them in night clothes. They rolled them in blankets.”

Because of the winter storm, Karr and the men placed them in an unheated building apart from the main house, and locked the door.

“She said it was two weeks — I remember distinctly her saying — ‘And it was two weeks before we could get to Abernathy to bury them.’

“That was the early days of Lubbock, you see.”

Dr. Wallace Hess, who began his practice in Lubbock in 1948, remembers the advent of penicillin.

“It had to be given every three hours at first. I gave some of the first at Southwestern Medical School — I was a student there. It was quite expensive then, because they didn’t have mass production techniques yet.”

According to Hess, there were two main hospitals at the time he started, and they did not offer an open-staff system for doctors.

His wife, Zelta, who was a nurse, remembers, “There were two groups really. One was West Texas Hospital, and the other was Lubbock General Hospital. Most doctors belonged to one or the other.”

That left independent physicians without a hospital to use in admitting patients who needed hospital care. But there were certain ways around the monopoly.

“One of my good friends who attended the Westminster Presbyterian Church — our particular congregation — was an obstetrician. When I was delivering patients, he admitted them under his name, and called me and had me to come over and take care of them. But all the orders came from him — everything was signed by him. He was just intervening on my behalf.

“It was the only way to do it.”

Hess, though a general practitioner, learned a related skill: anesthesia.

“Anesthesia and things of that nature were very rudimentary. For example, in order to put somebody to sleep for a surgical procedure, they just poured it (chemical) on a little metal mask that had a little gauze over it. You had to learn to get very skilled, because if you got too much on it, you could send them into orbit. It was a very delicate thing. And the other thing was that if you weren’t careful, it would put you to sleep, too.”

He remembers that in the earlier days, surgeries were performed in the patient’s home, often on the kitchen table near a means of boiling water to have a sterile way to wash hands. “They didn’t have gloves like we do nowadays,” he said.

“It was a totally different world.”

Hess continued his practice, and moved into sports medicine in which he treated Texas Tech football stars such as Donny Anderson.

“There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do with a football,” he remembers.

From a lantern in a windmill tower to the establishment of the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center by founding dean Dr. John A. Buesseler, took about 70 years. Now, 40 years after that, technology is soaring, but doctors are still difficult to access.

And in the 21st century there are no furrows to plow.

To comment on this story:

ray.westbrook@lubbockonline.com • 766-8711

shelly.gonzales@lubbockonline.com • 766-8747

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